Since Alex and Linda said ‘for better, for worse’ to a marital union, they have been working towards better until worse came on June 3, 2015.
In a flood and fire disaster that killed 150, Alex Mensah remembers that day his face was defaced by fire, leaving him a less impressive shadow of himself.
“I saw a big petrol tanker. I stood next to it. The tanker exploded, lifting me from the ground into the big fire. My thighs crashed the floor badly”.
Gas at a fuel station leaked into water climbed into the air and bombarded land and sky with an inferno that sank 150 into brown watery graves and dirty concrete gutters.
The world’s best teacher, experience, had taught his wife to abandon their Alajo home whenever it rained and seek shelter at her mother’s house at Lapaz.
“My wife had been to my end earlier. My wife sold goods at Obra Spot. That evening she told me she was going to her mother’s house because our house at Alajo which was near a gutter would possibly be flooded”.
The prediction was spot on even to Obra spot, her stall vanished in the floods.
While his wife secured herself, the husband, some 12km away at Circle, rose up from a concrete floor to make meaning of a tragic chaos around him.
Feeling the burns on his face, Alex said he trekked on foot fuelled by adrenaline and grace to reach his family at Lapaz.
“When I got out of the fire, out of shock and confusion I walked that night from the Nkrumah Circle to Lapaz”.
On the night of the disaster it was obvious Alex would not look the same again.
“He asked if I could recognize him,” she recalled the night of no lights. Sleeping in ‘dumsor’ she heard that knock on the door.
“My mother brought out a lamp and in fact when I saw his face, I melted. I couldn’t believe how changed he’d been”, a chubby-looking Linda told Joy News Fifi Koomson.
When adrenaline seeped out, a burnt Alex was rushed to the hospital like a several hundreds that night.
After many days, the ultimate discussion was to deeply examine the words, for better for worse.
“He asked if I would love him again”, a second proposal from the second face of Alex Mensah.
Linda said there were many voices from family and friends urging her to jump ship. He may have survived the fire, but continuing in this marriage is another fire of its own.
“Some of the friends and family members, after visiting him in hospital could tell me to leave him because he would not be able to work to raise money for the family even if he recovered”, an undertone economic viability of the marriage played out.
“Some of his friends told him ‘Linda would leave you because of how you’re looking now’ ” she revealed her husband’s fears.
” But I decided to stay because I felt that was how God was testing me”.
Alex and Linda are still living together with their two children. For them, the scars may linger, but so will the love.
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